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Because Challengers is a Luca Guadagnino film, and we can reliably expect the movies of the guy who associated Timothée Chalamet with peach-fucking to be at least a little gay, people on the internet have long wondered just how gay it would be.
This speaks to a number of things. Most importantly, everyone seems to want to see Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist shag. It also speaks to a greater appetite for queer desire on screen, not least shot by someone who has a proven track record for getting gay horniness right. Such speculation was hardly muted by the trailers, which teased a simmering load of homoerotic tension between the film's male leads. The film itself? Pretty gay—but it's not as direct as you might expect.
Challengers is centrally about aging tennis wunderkind Patrick Zweig (O'Connor) and his ex-bestie-now-frenemy Art Donaldson (Faist), who went on to become a Wimbledon-winning world champ while his old pal faltered. For most of their adult lives, they've rallied for the love and affirmation of one-time Adidas-sponsored tennis wiz Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), who was sidelined by a tragic injury early in her career. They've both wanted her since they were red-blooded, horny teenagers. Even after they all grow up and Tashi has kids with Art, she can't help but indulge the friction.
In this sense, Challengers is a deeply heterosexual movie — here are two culturally straight sports lovers circling the same woman like lions warring over a mate. But stopping there would be the analytical equivalent of serving into the net. Sometimes the film's homoeroticism is waved in our face like a well-worn jockstrap: There's already a ton of conversation online about the part where Art and Patrick are shepherded to each other's tongues by Tashi, devouring each other like ravenous bulldogs. That moment is played for laughs, but Art does have a boner immediately after. Guadagnino teases further something a little fruitier about both of the boys, and their relationship.
Another major scene that comes to mind plays out in the present day, after Patrick wins his first match of the Challenger. He sits in the locker room swiping through both men and women on Tinder. I'm a little less interested in the app stuff specifically: sure, maybe it's implying that he's bisexual, but we also know that he's desperate for somewhere to sleep for the night, and in that context, what's a little dick sucking, really? More important is the way that Guadagnino frames the scene from his perspective. Patrick is literally surrounded by swinging dicks. Big dicks, small dicks, dicks hidden under towels; the unseen dick attached to the sulking contestant Patrick has just beaten. It is deeply, unmistakably homoerotic. If it isn't allure in the air, it's intrigue. He's certainly not shy.
It's hardly a surprise that Guadagnino elects to pick at Challengers' undergirding queerness in a packed-out locker room. In movies, as in real-life, locker rooms are tinder boxes for queer curiosity and charged homoeroticism. Such is how it has been framed plenty of times on screen. In Queer as Folk, an empty school changing room is where 15-year-old horndog Nathan (Charlie Hunnam) tugs off one his bullies for the first time. For the oft-discussed, barely concealed homosexuality of Top Gun, let's borrow from legendary film critic Pauline Kael: “The movie is a shiny homoerotic commercial… The pilots strut around the locker room, towels hanging precariously from their waists.” Challengers' locker room scene called to mind an image familiar to gay movie buffs (and probably no one else), from Terence Davies' 1976 short film Children, of a young boy transfixed by the body of an older teen in the showers.
There's an overarching queerness to the filmmaking, too. (Go figure, it's Luca Guadagnino.) O'Connor and Faist are shot admiringly, objectified by the camera as the old Bond movies would ogle their euphemistically-named heroines. A couple of specific shots come to mind. Art bent over the camera, dripping sweat on us in slo-mo (sadly Challengers is not available in 4DX); Patrick sitting in a steam room opposite Art with his legs spread wide open, crotch hardly covered by a towel the size of a napkin, a knowing act of macho peacocking.
More generally speaking, there's the way that cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's camera sniffs around the vascularity of the boys' taut limbs. There is, too, deliberate attention paid to the smaller acts of intimacy between young Art and Patrick— like when Art uses his leg to drag Patrick's stool closer to him at lunch.
Which is all to say, on the question of whether Challengers is “gay,” much like real life, the answer is that it's complex.
Okay, fine, it's pretty gay. But the exciting, hot thing about it is that it's utterly uninterested in labels, or pigeon-holing its characters into easily drawn identities. Maybe Patrick doesn't want to fuck men, but he certainly seems like he wants to fuck Art. To extend this point, you could easily read Challengers as a film about two otherwise heterosexual men who want to fuck each other, but instead settle on the same woman as their mutual, opposite-sex stand-in. Just as Challengers isn't a film about tennis, nor is it a movie about sexuality — it's a movie about people who want to fuck.